The world’s demographers this week
increased their estimates of the world’s population through the coming
century. We are now on track to hit 10 billion people by 2100. Today,
humanity produces enough food to feed everyone but, because of the way we distribute it, there are still a billion hungry. One doesn’t need to be a frothing Malthusian
to worry about how we’ll all get to eat tomorrow. Current predictions
place most of the world’s people in Asia, the highest levels of
consumption in Europe and North America, and the highest population
growth rates in Africa — where the population could triple over the next 90 years.

There are, however, plans afoot to feed the world. One of the
countries to which the world’s development experts have turned as a test
bed is Malawi. Landlocked and a little smaller than Pennsylvania,
Malawi is consistently among the world’s poorest places. The latest figures
have 90 per cent of its 15 million people living on the equivalent of
less than US$2 a day. By century’s end, the population is
expected to be nearly 132 million. Today, some 40 per cent of Malawians
live below the country’s poverty line, and part of the reason for
widespread chronic poverty is that more than 70 per cent of Malawians
live in rural areas. There, they depend on agriculture — and nearly
every farmer grows maize [corn]. “Chimanga ndi moyo” — “maize is life”, the local saying goes — but growing maize pays so poorly that few people can afford to eat anything else.

If you arrive in Malawi in March, just after the rainy season,
growing food seems like a fool’s game. It’s hard to find a patch of red
soil that isn’t a tall riot of green. From the roadside you can see
maize about to ripen, with squash and beans planted at the base of the
thick stalks. Even the tobacco fields are doing well this year. But
there’s a rumble in this jungle. Malawi’s swaying fields are a
battleground in which three different visions for the future of global
agriculture are ranged against one other.

Three visions

The first and most venerable development idea for Malawi sees these
farmers as survivors of a doomed way of life who need to be helped into
the hereafter. Oxford economist Paul Collier is the poster child for
this “modernist” view, one that he presented in a scathing November 2008
Foreign Affairsarticle
in which he cudgeled the “romantics” who yearned for peasant
agriculture. Observing both that wages in cities are higher than in the
countryside, and that every large developed country is able to feed
itself without peasant farmers, Collier argued the virtues of big
agriculture. He also called on the European Union to support genetically
modified crops and for the United States to kill domestic subsidies for
biofuel. He was one-third right: biofuel subsidies are absurd, not
least because they drive up food prices, siphoning grains from the bowls
of the poorest into the gas-tanks of the richest — with limited
environmental gains, at best.

Collier’s contempt for peasants seems, however, to rest on something
other than the facts. Although international agribusiness has generated
great profits ever since the East India Company, it hasn’t brought
riches to farmers and farmworkers, who are invariably society’s poorest
people. Indeed, big agriculture earns its moniker — it tends to work
most lucratively with large-scale plantations and operations to which
small farmers are little more than an impediment.

It turns out that if you’re keen to make the world’s poorest people
better off, it’s smarter to invest in their farms and workplaces than to
send them packing to the cities. In its 2008 World Development Report, the World Bank found that, indeed, investment in peasantswas
among the most efficient and effective ways of raising people out of
poverty and hunger. It was an awkward admission, as the World Bank had long
been trumpeting Collier’s brand of agricultural development. Farmers
organisations from Malawi to India to Brazil had been pointing out that
access to land, water, sustainable technology, education, markets, state
investment in processing, and — above all, access to level playing
field on domestic and international markets — would help them. But it
took three decades of lousy policy for the development establishment to
realize this, and they’re not quite there yet.

Because of its colonial legacy, Malawi had long been following
conventional economic wisdom: exporting things in which the country had a
comparative advantage (in Malawi’s case, tobacco) and using the funds
to buy goods on the international market in which it didn’t have an
advantage. But when tobacco prices fall, as they have of late, there’s
less foreign exchange with which to venture into international markets.
And being landlocked, Malawi also faces higher prices for grain than its
four neighbours — Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania — simply
because it costs more to transport into the country. According to one estimate,
the marginal cost of importing a ton of food-aid maize is $400, versus
$200 a ton to import it commercially, and only $50 to source it
domestically using fertilisers. Particularly at a time when food and
fertiliser prices are predicted to rise, Malawi is wise to consider how
vulnerable to the caprices of international markets it wants to be.

This partly explains why, in the late 1990s,almost a decade before it became fashionable,Malawi
bucked the advice of its international donors and decided to spend the
majority its agriculture budget on fertiliser, the first and perhaps
most necessary ingredient in prepping the soil for producing viable
crops. The government gave farmers a “starter pack” with enough beans,
improved seeds and fertiliser to cover about a fifth of an acre.
International donors weren’t pleased. A USAID official decried the
program as consigning farmers to a “poverty treadmill” in which farmers
would be stuck growing just enough maize to survive, but never enough to
get rich. Although the program had modest success, it took off when
Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika expanded the program over the
2005-2006 growing season, quadrupling the amount of fertiliser
available. Although driven by domestic political promises, his
international timing was perfect — he was embarking on a policy whose
time had come. And this is why what happens in Malawi’s fields today
matter so much beyond its borders.

History of agricultural policy

To understand why, we need a quick history of agricultural policy in
developing countries. Many developing countries were, especially before
World War II, pantries to be raided by their colonisers.
Post-independence, rural areas were often net contributors to government
revenues, but there were some assurances of stability, with government
schemes to buy crops at guaranteed prices. Internationally — especially
in Asia — the post-war era saw governments pressured to feed a restive
population that was increasingly wondering whether their lot wouldn’t be
improved through socialism and a change in land ownership. In order to
fight the Cold War in foreign fields, the US government and key
foundations invested heavily in agricultural technologies such as
improved seed and fertiliser. These technologies were designed to keep
land in the hands of its feudal owners, food plentiful and communists
at bay. In 1968, William Gaud, the USAID administrator, dubbed it a "Green Revolution", because it was designed to prevent a red one.

For a range of mainly geopolitical reasons, the Green Revolution was
implemented with less fervor and success in Africa than in Asia. The
International Fertilizer Development Center observed
in 2006 that $4 billion worth of soil nutrients were being mined from
the African soil by farmers who, struggling to make ends meet, weren’t
replenishing the nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous in the ground
beneath their feet.

The prescription for declining soil quality lay, however, not in
addressing the policy causes of farmer’s environmental panic — a
systematic neglect since the 1980s to which the World Bank itself
admitted in an internal evaluation
— but to fix the soil with technology. So in 2006, the Rockefeller
Foundation (the original sponsors of the Green Revolution in Asia)
joined the Gates Foundation to launch The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. This is the second brave new development policy that hopes to feed Africa.

Soil technology the answer?

AGRA claims to have learned the lessons of history, rejecting
Collier’s view and focusing on policies that “unlike the Green
Revolution in Latin America, which mostly benefited large-scale farmers
because they had access to irrigation and were therefore in a position
to use the improved varieties … [are] specifically geared to overcome
the challenges facing smallholder farmers”.

So did it work in Malawi? It depends on the goal. If the aim was to
increase output, then yes. Although economist and Earth Institute
Director Jeffrey Sachs recently over-egged the data by suggesting that production had doubled because of the fertiliser subsidy (it only increased by 300,000–400,000 tons or up to 15 per cent, the rest being mainly due to the return of the rains), the amount of maize in Malawi has undoubtedly gone up.

As the 50 million people who are food insecure in the United States know all
too well, though, having enough food in the country doesn’t necessarily
mean that all people get to eat, and Malawi still has more than its fair
share of glassy-eyed and underweight children. Chronically hungry kids
have low height for their age and the number of children malnourished in
this way — “stunted” is the term in the statistics — has remained
stubbornly high since the subsidies began.

Measuring increased yields of maize from fertiliser and starter kits
doesn’t necessarily translate into a society that is well fed and
economically viable in terms of agriculture.Rachel
Bezner Kerr, a professor of geography at the University of Western
Ontario who also works in Malawi as a project coordinator for the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project,
isn’t surprised. “Any nutritionist would scoff at the notion that
increased yield automatically leads to increased nutrition”, she says.

Bezner Kerr told me that having more crops in the fields and bigger
yields can actually be a bad thing, taking “women out of the home and
away from domestic work. Particularly if they are doing early childcare
feeding, this can lead to poorer nutritional outcomes.” What happens
within the household is crucial in translating increased output into
better nutrition.

Women

Indeed, gender matters when it comes to food and farming. Sixty
per cent of the world’s malnourished people are women or girls. Yet the
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization recently pointed outthat
by increasing access to the same resources as men, women could boost
their farm’s output by up to 30 per cent, leading to a 4 per cent increase
in total agricultural output in developing countries. In Malawi, 90
per cent of women work part time, and women are paid some 30 per cent less
than men for similar jobs. Women are also burdened with care work,
especially in a country ravaged by HIV/AIDS. Even if they own land and
have access to the same resources as men, women find themselves torn
between the demands of child and elder care, cooking, carrying water,
finding firewood, planting, weeding and harvesting.

Social change

These problems are better addressed through social change — abetted by programs like the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project
— than chemistry. Yet these are precisely the kinds of programs that
are crowded out by fertiliser subsidies. The fertiliser program has been
a jealous child, sucking resources away from other programs. The
opportunity cost offertiliser for farmers is money
that might have been spent on something else — a serious concern when
global fertiliser prices are going through the roof. Research by the
World Bank in Latin America and South East Asia
has suggested that it’s smarter for government to subsidise public
goods like agricultural research and extension services and irrigation,
rather than directing money at private inputs like fertiliser.

Again, this matters beyond Malawi’s borders, particularly in
sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s population growth is scheduled to be
driven by “high fertility countries” — most of which are in Africa. The
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter,
recently argued that the world might be better fed not by pumping the
soil with chemicals, but by using cutting-edge “agroecological”
techniques to build soil fertility, and using policy to achieve
environmental and social sustainability. In a review
of 286 sustainable agriculture projects in 57 developing countries
covering 91 million acres, a team led by British environmental scientist
Jules Pretty found production increases of 79 per cent — again, far
higher than the fertiliser subsidy in Malawi, and with a far broader
range of ecological and social benefits than increased food production.

These programs succeed, in part, because they don’t see hunger as the
consequence of a surfeit of peasants or a deficit in soil, but as the
result of complex environmental, social and political causes. You don’t
just need chemists to solve hunger — you need sociologists, soil
biologists, agronomists, ethnographers and even economists. Paying for
their skills is the opportunity cost of spending precious dollars on
imported fertiliser. Of course, agroecology is an entirely different
paradigm than one in which technology is dropped into laps from foreign
laboratories accompanied by a sheet of instructions. The programs
require much more participatory education work, and much more investment
in public goods, than the Malawian government and donors currently seem
inclined to provide.

Agroecology is the third development vision battling for the future.
In Malawi, it works. By growing cowpeas and groundnuts with maize —
expanding the range of crops — Bezner Kerr’s program has beat the
fertiliser program’s yield by 10 per cent and increased nutrition
outcomes too. Yet even agroecology has its limits. Fifteen per cent of
Malawians remain ultra poor, living on less than a dollar a day andunable
to buy enough to eat. They tend to be people who are landless, or who
have poor quality land and have to sell their labour at harvest time,
just when they need it the most. They remain untouched by the Malawian
miracle.

Peasants displaced

The future doesn’t look terribly promising for agroecology. Concerned
about the financial sustainability of its fertiliser subsidy program,
the Malawian government is about to embark on a Green Belt project, in
which thousands of acres will be irrigated to induce foreign investors
to begin large-scale farming of sugar cane and other export crops. The
foreign exchange brought in by this program, it is hoped, will bankroll
the fertiliser spending. The result will help balance the country’s
current account, but as a consequence, thousands of smallholders are
scheduled to be displaced to clear lands that will attract the kind of
large-scale agriculture of which Collier would approve.

Particularly in the light of the new population projections for the
21st century, it seems foolish to stick to 20th century agricultural
policy. Recall that the agroecological interventions in Malawi turned on
women’s empowerment. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has famously argued
that there are few policies better placed to improve individual, family
and community lives (and lower fertility rates) than education
— particularly the education of women and girls. The prophesies
presented to us by demographers vary widely — change the assumptions,
and you end up with a world of between 8 billion and 15 billion people.
No matter what the future holds, though, it’s clear that a world in
which everyone gets to eat depends on women’s empowerment — and rather
than treating that fact as something irrelevant to feeding the world,
agroecology puts it right in the middle.

A great deal of past agriculture policy has been designed either
economically to bomb villages in order to save them, or to administer a
technological quick fix in order to postpone politics. Collier wants to
get rid of peasants. New fads want to keep them, but keep them knee deep
in chemicals. Yet if we are serious about feeding the hungry, in Malawi
or anywhere else, we need to recognise that the majority of the hungry
are women, and that we need more public, not private, spending on those
least able to command rural resources. Because when it comes to growing
food, those who tend the land are anything but fools.

[Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He has
degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics
and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and
protested against them around the world. He’s currently a visiting
scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. He is currently an IATP Food and Community Fellow.
He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US
House Financial Services Committee and is an advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for
The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San
Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday and The Observer. His first
book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and his latest, The Value of Nothing, is a New York Times best-seller. To see Raj’s latest events, visit the Events page on his website.]

Comments

A new United Nations report says that there
could be a billion more people on earth by 2100 than previously
forecast, but New Scientist environmental writer Fred Pearse says the
new prediction is based on perverse and contradictory assumptions.

The latest global population projections, published by the United
Nations last week, say that the world will be awash with 10.1 billion
people by 2100, a billion more than previously supposed. Already, there
is talk again of a ticking population time bomb.

But a closer look at the assumptions behind this scenario shows it to
be perverse and contradictory. In fact, it looks more like a political
construct than a scientific analysis.

The heart of the problem is this: the new UN estimates record that
both world population and global fertility rates are currently slightly
lower than presumed when the last projections were made two years ago.
Yet, they project significantly higher growth rates than those estimated
two years ago.

This paradox is created by a seemingly arbitrary change in
assumptions about future fertility that requires a proper explanation.
And quickly. Plans to cope with an increasing array of global challenges
— not least climate change and food policy — are predicated on the UN’s
demographic projections. The past few years have seen a plethora of
scientific papers asking ‘can the world feed 9 billion?’ It won’t be
long before the work is revisited to see whether we can feed 10 billion.

We are doing quite well at defusing the population bomb. Women today,
on average, have half as many babies as their grandmothers did. World
fertility has fallen from 4.9 children per woman in the early 1960s to
an expected 2.45 between 2010 and 2015, a projection revised down from
the 2.49 figure of two years ago.

The trend is near-universal. With childhood diseases such as measles
and tetanus in retreat, for the first time in history most children get
to grow up. Population quadrupled in the past century as this happened.
But now women are learning to adjust to falling infant mortality and
having fewer children. Other factors include urbanization. On a peasant
farm in Africa, young children are an economic asset, minding the goats
or fetching and carrying. Once families move to the cities, children are
a liability, requiring years of education to get a job. Fertility rates
are much lower in cities.

Falling fertility doesn’t instantly translate into fewer babies. That
is because of the huge demographic bulge of twentieth-century baby
boomers — now adult and fertile. But as they age, and if fertility rates
continue to fall, population growth must subside and could go into
decline.

The key questions are how fast and how far fertility will fall. As
the UN notes, “small variations in fertility can produce major
differences in the size of populations over the long run.” That is why
the assumptions built into the new projections are so crucial.

The UN’s previous ‘medium variant’ projection, published in 2008,
concluded that world population would rise from the present 7 billion
and peak in mid-century at around the 9.15 billion expected in 2050. The
new projection finds no peak. Instead, world population reaches 9.3
billion in 2050 and 10.1 billion in 2100, with further growth still in
the works.

The UN has yet to publish its detailed reasoning, but a collection of
frequently asked questions issued alongside the new projections says
that most of the difference is due to an upward revision of its
fertility forecasts — a revision unrelated to current trends.

There is history to this. For many years, demographers reckoned that
world fertility was headed inexorably for the rich-world replacement
level of about 2.1 children per woman. But in the past 30 years, this
has looked increasingly like too high a number. In almost all developed
countries, fertility rates have fallen to well below replacement levels.
Despite a minor bounce-back in recent years, most of Europe remains
below 1.5.

“In almost all developed countries, fertility rates have fallen to
well below replacement levels.” With much of Asia and Latin America on
the same path, almost a decade ago the UN rethought the 2.1 end point.
In 2003, its UN population division, under then-director Joseph Chamie,
decided that its ‘medium variant’ projection should instead assume
convergence at 1.85. It was a compromise, Chamie told me. Some argued
for 1.6, whereas others wanted to retain 2.1. The latter group, he said,
feared that a low estimate would send the ‘wrong message’ that our
population worries were over.

The projections made in 2008 retained the figure of 1.85, but it has
now reverted to 2.1 — the predominant reason for the leap from 9 billion
to 10 billion. The assumption now is that countries with higher
fertility rates will fall to the 2.1 figure and not below, while those
below will rise to reach it.

Is this realistic? As Joel Cohen, a demographer at Columbia
University in New York, put it in 2002: “No case is yet known of a
population with fertility above replacement level that converged to
replacement level and then stayed there.” That remains the case. Chamie
this week said he had seen “no compelling evidence” to justify a return
to the 2.1 figure.

The UN boasts that its new projections have incorporated a more
probabilistic approach into the model. That is good. But, as the UN
makes clear, the model “incorporated the additional assumption that,
over the long run, replacement-level fertility would be reached”. In
other words, the crucial new fertility end point of 2.1 did not emerge
from the new probabilistic analysis. It was imposed on it, and the UN
should explain why.

11 May 2011, Rome -
Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human
consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or
wasted, according to an FAO-commissioned study.

The document, Global Food Losses and Food Waste, was commissioned by FAO from the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (SIK) for Save Food!,
an international congress being held in Düsseldorf 16-17 May at the
trade fair of the international packaging industry Interpack2011.

Other key findings include:

Industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same
quantities of food — respectively 670 and 630 million tonnes.

Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food
(222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan
Africa (230 million tonnes).

Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food.

The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more
than half of the world's annual cereals crop (2.3 billion tonnes in
2009/2010).

Losses and waste

The report distinguishes between food loss
and food waste. Food losses — occurring at the production, harvest,
post-harvest and processing phases — are most important in developing
countries, due to poor infrastructure, low levels of technology and low
investment in the food production systems.

Food waste is more a problem in industrialized countries, most often
caused by both retailers and consumers throwing perfectly edible
foodstuffs into the trash. Per capita waste by consumers is between
95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in
sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia each throw away only
6-11 kg a year.

Total per capita food production for human consumption is about 900
kg a year in rich countries, almost twice the 460 kg a year produced in
the poorest regions. In developing countries 40 percent of losses occur
at post-harvest and processing levels while in industrialized countries
more than 40 percent of losses happen at retail and consumer levels.

Food losses during harvest and in storage translate into lost income
for small farmers and into higher prices for poor consumers, the report
noted. Reducing losses could therefore have an "immediate and
significant" impact on their livelihoods and food security.

Squandering resources

Food loss and waste also amount to a major
squandering of resources, including water, land, energy, labour and
capital and needlessly produce greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to
global warming and climate change.

The report offered a number of practical suggestions on how to reduce losses and waste.

In developing countries the problem is chiefly one of inadequate
harvest techniques, poor post-harvest management and logistics, lack of
suitable infrastructure, processing and packaging, and lack of marketing
information which would allow production to better match demand.

The advice is therefore to strengthen the food supply chain by
assisting small farmers to link directly to buyers. The private and
public sectors should also invest more in infrastructure, transportation
and in processing and packaging.

In middle- and high-income countries food losses and waste stem
largely from consumer behaviour but also from lack of communication
between different actors in the supply chain.

Over-emphasis on appearance

At retail level, large quantities of food
are also wasted due to quality standards that over-emphasize appearance.
Surveys show that consumers are willing to buy produce not meeting
appearance standards as long as it is safe and tastes good. Customers
thus have the power to influence quality standards and should do so, the
report said.

Selling farm produce closer to consumers, without having to conform
to supermarkets' quality standards, is another suggestion. This could be
achieved through farmers' markets and farm shops.

Good use for food that would otherwise be thrown away should be
found. Commercial and charity organizations could work with retailers to
collect, and then sell or use products that have been disposed of but
are still good in terms of safety, taste and nutritional value..

Changing consumer attitudes

Consumers in rich countries are generally
encouraged to buy more food than they need. "Buy three, pay two"
promotions are one example, while the oversized ready-to-eat meals
produced by the food industry are another. Restaurants frequently offer
fixed-price buffets that spur customers to heap their plates.

Education in schools and political initiatives are possible starting
points to changing consumer attitudes, the report suggested.
Rich-country consumers should be taught that throwing food away
needlessly is unacceptable.

They should also be made aware that given the limited availability of
natural resources it is more effective to reduce food losses than
increase food production in order to feed a growing world population.

A separate report on food packaging for developing countries also prepared for the Save Food! congress
noted that appropriate packaging is a key factor impacting on losses
occurring at almost every stage of the food chain.